


Chaos Chaos On Repeat

by snugglepup



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Culture, Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 00:23:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12971637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snugglepup/pseuds/snugglepup
Summary: The story of two young deviants, their friends and enemies, and a moirallegiance forged in alienation.(Set on Alternia in a no-game AU featuring a very strange version of troll culture in which social gender roles somewhat resemble the inverse of their human equivalents. Technically a prequel/reboot of the very old fic 'Together We'll Ring In The New Year.')





	Chaos Chaos On Repeat

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the primary fic I'm working on right now, so it'd be smart to expect very sporadic updates at best, at least for the time being, but the first chapter is done so I thought I might as well stick it up here.
> 
> The fic this is kind of rebooting, 'Together We'll Ring In The New Year', is probably abandoned in its current state due to it being old and filled with bad decisions; that said, if I ever get deep enough into this one, it's conceivable it might actually become a proper reboot and not just a prequel, and even if I don't do that you can consider the old fic to be sort of half-canon and half not. If you like this, it might be worth a look; it's like, 98,000 words and some of it is interesting. Just go into that shit knowing I've grown a lot and changed a lot since I wrote it.

_we can cross the atlantic ocean, draw a huge line_

_separate ourselves from things that die_

 

 _chaos chaos –_ _across the map_

 

* * *

♍

 

Desert travel is dangerous, exhausting work. Nights are bitingly cold beneath the clear moonlight, relying on the movements of your body to keep you warm (walking, keep on walking, never let yourself slow down). Every day is raging hot, scorching the water from your blood, the dunes swarming with daywalkers (sleep with one eye open, listen for the off-kilter click-rattle-click of the parasites in their thoraxes).

This is your first time ranging so far from home. Your supplies _typically_ hold just fine; your Imperial allowance is more than enough to survive on your caste alone, sometimes with extra credit left over. Unfortunately, there's nowhere near here to procure quality cloth, and so, inevitably, one late morning extranet shopping spree too many sees you nearly out of food when a supply delivery misses your hive and puts the usual process off by nearly a perigee. You assume it was shot down and salvaged, though the perpetrators' days must be numbered; heretics and aspiring rebels are the only trolls stupid or desperate enough to do such a thing.

You sit and run grains of sand in between your fingers. It's been a long, exhausting night, and while you'd hoped to make far more progress than this, you'll doom yourself in the long run if you over-exert your muscles now. You sigh and unsling your rear-mounted thoracic supply container.

(Of course you _could_ just think 'backpack' and save some mental gymnastics, but your friends have been so snooty lately that you're deliberately cultivating lowblood slang as part of an ongoing campaign of passive-aggressive linguistic warfare.)

The sand is already growing warmer beneath your skirt as angry red light spills across the horizon. Practically every joint below your abdomen aches, and the weight of your lip adornment cylinder at your hip is threatening to cause minor back problems.

There's an old canopy taking up space in your supply container, which you lay out on the ground, but you don't actually want to set the whole thing up just yet. Exposure to the first hour or so of sunlight will help recharge its optical camouflage and proximity alarm system. It won't do you much good if it can't even warn you of the encroaching undead. Moonlight does help things along, of course; you make a point to keep some of its photon absorption paneling poking out as you travel. It will also charge itself somewhat while in use, but the head start on its battery life reduces risk of malfunction.

You're not quite sure how you would have done this, were you entirely genetically pure. How in the world would someone with normal sensitivity to sunlight _survive_ such a trek? Would they simply need to be even better outfitted than you are? You suppose that's why hardly anyone lives all the way out here. The landscape is dotted with the ruins of half-built hives that were home to newly-surfaced trolls for no more than days or weeks before their early expirations; you are one of the rare few who have yet to keel over and die.

You flop onto your back and stare into a sky that stretches on forever, wondering which of the thousands of tiny lights far above are distant stars and which are satellites and ships in orbit. It won't be long before they're invisible again, wrapped in a thick cloak of sunlit clouds.

At least there's a bit of absurd romance to all of this. Adventure is the perfect way to throw away your life, but there's an allure to it even so.

The first five-night half of this daymere is nearly over, at least. You should arrive at the nearest outpost to your hive by next midnight, and you've brought spare clothing projects to barter for rations and purified dihydrogen monoxide.

... It's a shame no one is here to suffer for your inconsistent low-class vernacular, but you make _yourself_ smile, at least, and out here you'll take what you can get.

 

* * *

 

You're amazed when evening comes and you haven't been attacked even once. The worst things you have to contend with are a stiff spine and severe thrist, one of which you can fix without much effort. A few more miles and a climb up the hideous, nigh-mountainous berm surrounding the outpost, and you'll be able to...

Well, not _relax_ _._ In theory you'll be in far more danger there than you are out here; you're confident you can execute any number of daywalkers, but actual living trolls can be a massive threat, both expected or otherwise. Daywalkers also never carry _projectile velocitors._ There are no snipers amongst the undead.

It doesn't help matters that you're dressed this way, either. Being mistaken for a male tends to involve being mistaken as easier prey, and all that does is increase your odds of being robbed and murdered. You probably should have caved and worn something you're less comfortable with – all you had to do was lose the skirt, really – but before you'd actually left your hive, some fleeting pride in your own means of self-expression seemed important enough to outweigh personal safety.

Foolish and short-sighted. Pride doesn't feel quite so valuable now you're about to be face-to-face with other trolls in a space other than your imagination.

Eventually you reach that enormous slope of sand, grit your fangs, and begin to climb, midnight moons leering from above. It's absurd how long it takes, particularly with a supply container so packed full of trade goods; you're going to arrive exhausted. You wonder if that was the builders' real intention, as opposed to any sort of safety against harsh weather and desert fauna. It probably was.

Your bloodpusher is racing from both exertion and anxiety when you reach the top. Then you look down and see the carnage.

The outpost is nothing but rubble now, structures battered, half-razed, and splashed with blood in (mostly) low colors. Whatever smoke might have risen from the devastation has clearly long since vanished; the raid might have happened before you even left home. You wonder _who_ and _how_ , though the _why_ is meaningless.

It isn't until you've descended nervously into the ruins, ready to draw your weapon at the slightest provocation, that you realize just how thorough the destruction here actually was. Every single hive and storefront has been annihilated almost _methodically_ , blasted and burned out, leaving only sad husks of what used to bustle with life. The streets as well are dyed in burgundy, brown, and occasionally yellow, narrow gutters flooded with dried blood.

Hundreds of projectile tunnels have turned a number of walls all but _porous_ , even more gruesomely stained than the actual ground. Executions. _Mass_ executions, rather; clearly there were dozens lined up here and slaughtered without a hint of mercy, not that you'd expect mercy from raiders.

... _If_ they were raiders. All of this seems too _clean_ for that, in a way. Most structures seem razed in a very calculated manner, not merely toppled by heavy munitions. Whatever resistance the inhabitants mounted, it didn't last long.

When you reach the market square at the center of the outpost, you understand. A massive sign has been painted with untold gallons of gore: two curving shackles, crossed out to ensure there is no mistaking that it was cultists and their sympathizers who were exterminated in this cursed place.

Behind the sign, hundreds of bodies have been piled up here and burned, blackened bones already picked clean by feathered corpse-feeders and insects. It's... a lot to take in. You lean up against the wall of a bombed-out shop and try to regain your composure, more than a little nauseated. While you wouldn't call yourself faint of pusher, this is... this is quite something.

More importantly, if you're to prioritize like a reasonable organism, this is bad for _you._ Further inspection reveals there is absolutely nothing of value left in the mass grave the outpost has been reduced to, and if you can't even scavenge for food...

You have three choices, now. Sit here and die, return home and see how long you can go without starving, or press on and consume what's left of your rations in an attempt to reach the nearest city. From the top of the farthest berm you can see lights in the distance; another ten days might actually get you to the outskirts. _Might_ is the key word, but your other options are even more disastrous.

Wasting precious husktop charge was not on the agenda for tonight, but since you're in a high spot with passable reception, this might be your last chance to speak to anyone and everyone in your life. You should at least send off a few messages before plunging into the unknown.

 

grimAuxiliatrix (GA) started trolling  arachnidsGrip (AG)

 

GA: So I Thought You Ought To Know Im Maybe Going To Die

GA: I Dont Really Have Much Battery Left And Theres Nowhere To Recharge

GA: But I Wanted To At Least Say Something

AG: What the fuck is your deal? I'm kinda 8usy right now, don't 8e such a drama empress.

AG: Sort of in the middle of some important FLARPing 8usiness, not that you'd care.

GA: Well Thats Great I Hope You Have Fun With Your Matesprit

GA: Ill Just Be Over Here Wandering Around The Desert Dying Of Exposure

AG: Yeah, wh8ever, I'm sure you'll 8e fine. Also, she's still not my matesprit. Never was, never will 8e. Wh8t's your pro8lem with her, anyway?

GA: Pyrope Isnt Really The One I Have A Problem With

GA: Tell Her I Said Hi And Also Probably Goodbye

AG: Oh my god, could you 8E any more passive-aggressive? Look, if this is a8out th

AG: W41T WH4T DO YOU M34N YOUR3 M4YB3 GO1NG TO D13

AG: K4N4Y4? 4R3 YOU TH3R3?

GA: Outpost Is Destroyed And Im Traveling To The City Now

GA: Cant Waste Any More Power Have Fun With Your Pet Sociopath

AG: L1ST3N 1 DONT R34LLY C4R3 1F YOUR3 J34LOUS OR WH4T3V3R TH1S 1S

AG: YOUR3 MY FR13ND SO PL34S3 TRY NOT TO D13

GA:

GA: Thanks

GA: Ill Do My Best I Guess

 

grimAuxiliatrix (GA) stopped trolling  arachnidsGrip (AG)

 

grimAuxiliatrix (GA) started trolling  apocalypseArisen (AA)

 

GA: Hello Im Running Out Of Battery Life But I Thought You Ought To Know Im Probably Going To Die Alone In The Desert

GA: Are You There

GA: Ill Take That As A No

GA: Well Ill Talk To You Later Then

GA: Or Not

GA: Hope Youre Having A Good Night

AA: wait im here

grimAuxiliatrix (GA) stopped trolling  apocalypseArisen (AA)

 

AA: welp

 

grimAuxiliatrix (GA) started trolling caligulasAquarium (CA)

 

GA: Hey So I Thought You Ought To

GA: Actually Fuck It Never Mind

 

grimAuxiliatrix (GA) stopped trolling  caligulasAquarium (CA)

 

... 2% battery remaining. You'd like to poke your other whole one or two other acquaintances, but you might need that last couple of minutes for something else.

There isn't much left to do, now. No way to further prepare yourself, no one else to say your possible goodbye to. You wonder if this really is how things are going to end for you. Somehow you always thought you'd be one of the lucky few who _didn't_ die in a stupid and pointless manner. So much for being smarter than the average five-sweep-old.

It's time to pack your gear up again and get back to walking.

 

* * *

♋

 

There's some kind of unbelievable racket out in your goddamn lawnring, and it is _way_ too early in the evening to be ripped from the sticky arms of mildly tolerable daymeres like this. Somebody had better be getting culled, because if this is Signis and Albria throwing another shitfit in the hopes of some ash-starved idiot third shoving themself in between, you've got half a pan to _make it_ a culling.

... Hmm. Definitely a lot of persistent yelling, which was _your_ designated vocation around here last time you checked, so _something_ substantial is going down. No explosions or gurgling screams yet, so that's a thing. You drag yourself out of your slime with a long chittering yawn and stumble out of your respiteblock, through a half-open door, and all the way into your ablution chamber, twist the dials without really paying attention, scald the goo off your dermis and undershirt.

You'd change _that_ out for a less filthy one, but the laundry's gone to shit lately while you've been failing to ward off depression by immersing your battered consciousness in various exciting and dynamic extranet games, and you kind of don't feel like having to look at or think about what's underneath right now, anyway.

Right, right, clothes. Plain black t-shirt with "GO FUCK YOURSELF" in bright cheerful gray where your sign should be, wrinkly pants you forgot to wash four nights back. Your specibus is hanging halfway off your desk, so you rescue _that_ and strap it on, like hell are you going out there unarmed. You've got a dispute to settle and you sure aren't gonna do it romantically.

While you're double-checking to see if you actually put on those pants or if it was a half-conscious hallucination, Dad wanders into your doorway, clicking his pincers anxiously. You try to shoo him away.

"Dad, I'll be fine, I'm not gonna get murdered _this_ early in the evening –"

He lets out a trademark obnoxious screech. You grit your teeth, rattle out your secondary vocal chambers, and jab your finger in your specibus's general direction.

"I said _I'll be fine._ Go chew on a roe cube or something, I'll be back in ten minutes, max. Go! Fuckin' mind your own business."

An irritable clicking frenzy, and then he's off to the nutrition block. You shouldn't spoil him on the damn roe less than an hour into your day, but what's a poor asshole to do?

The yelling out there is still going. You're _pretty_ sure that's Signis, but you're not sure who the hell the other voice is, maybe she's _finally_ gone pitch for somebody and invited them over? No, they'd be indoors by now to make sure nobody like you wanders out and shanks them, so it can't be that... Damn, you would've liked some more drama around here, too.

A scatter-rifle blast clears the air and sends dozens of usually-tenacious avians fluttering off into the sky _just_ when you shoulder through your front door.

Aaaand that's Signis alright, eye twitching, staring down at a freshly ventilated blueblood who's leaking all over her grass.

... _Shit._

 _"_ What the _fuck_ are you _thinking_ _!?_ You shot a _blueblood_ right outside _my hive?_ What happens when this asshole's quadrants show up? Did it even occur to you that you might have just gotten everybody here _fucking murdered?"_

You wish you were angrier than you are terrified. At least the goddamned idiot looks scared enough that she knows what she _did._ She trains the firearm on you for a second, and then lowers it, eyes about as wide as eyes get.

"Vo what? He wav too much of a jackavv to _have_ any quadrantv, and it'v none of your buvinevv who I xoot anyway."

 _"Nobody's too much of a jackass to have any quadrants, you jackass!_ _"_

Maybe _you'll_ just go cut her useless throat _before_ you're all fucked to Derse and back and pin the floppy corpse up with an apology note. It sure would be great if that turned out to be enough to keep your lawnring from joining all the other low-ish-blood multi-hive quasi-urban communities that have been wiped right off the goddamn map by vengeful rich pupas with too much time on their claws.

"Fine, it wavn't _the perfect devivion_ _._ It'v vtill not _your_ problem, vo vtep off already."

"No, see, that's exactly the _opposite_ of a thing that's fucking true, it's _everybody's problem_ now! Fuck, you know what? Maybe we'll all die! Maybe _that's_ where things are headed. It's way too late to fix your incredible failure of judgment. My goddamn sage wisdom's wasted _here._ _"_

You throw your hands up in the air and stalk dramatically off into the shrubbery. You're going to start bursting veins in your pan if you don't get some air away from any other allegedly sentient lifeforms.

... After a minute or two of walking you're on the outskirts of the lawnring, bored, and you don't want to look wishy-washy coming back already, so you're stuck out here. Great. _Perfect._ It isn't even nice out, either, there's a hot wind blowing in from the desert to the east that's sucking all the moisture out of the air, it's terrible.

Even if you _don't_ all get murdered, what the fuck are you going to do with your night? Your idiot friends are apparently useless when it comes to recommending decent games, rivaled only by their uselessness at being entertaining in and of themselves. You've been sort of taking a break from virus development after you accidentally locked your husktop into an infinite loop of intense purple-on-purple pacification porn you had to completely wipe the operating system to fix, so there's nothing to work on, really. What's left? Rewatching the same movies you've seen a thousand times?

This is such a bullshit night. You snarl at nothing in particular and kick a small mammal skull that happens to be near your feet, which goes spinning off into the brush and thwacks into... something that grunts in response.

You've already popped your specibus and caught your sickles out of the open air almost before you know it.

"Is that a _troll_ or an animal, and either way, are you gonna give me any shit?"

Silence. You should just back away slowly, see if you can make it back to your hive after all; it's too damn early to cull any random monster and if it _is_ another troll you sure as hell aren't getting involved. You _should,_ but you don't, because you're you. Instead you creep closer, nudge aside branches and leaves to get a better look, one sickle primed to cut if something so much as twitches in your direction.

... Well, fuck. That is _definitely_ not an animal, that's some poor bulgehead passed out in the grass. What the hell happened here? You don't see any obvious wounds, no blood... just some guy in a fancy skirt that's all caked with sand and miscellaneous grit. Huh. You guess there was more than just moisture-free air coming in from the desert; you've got moisture-free _people,_ too.

You nudge him with your foot and are rewarded with another mostly-unconscious "ngh" kind of noise. Hmm. He's wearing a big-ass rear-mounted thoracic supply container. The smart thing to do _now_ would be to just kind of duck down, slit his throat real quick, and salvage everything you can carry. Talk about depressing, though, the dumb fuck trudged god only knows how many miles through the desiccated wastechute of the continent just to flop over in the bushes and die without even knowing what killed him.

Ah, shit, why'd you have to think that _through_ so far? You're pathetic, you know it, but how are you supposed to mercy-cull somebody basically innocent who's got such an obvious short-term sob story? Murder's something you're only decent at when you're pissed off; right now you're just melancholy.

The temptation to learn more is fucking intense. You're bored out of your pan and every nasty pink crevice of thought-flesh in there is as thirsty for intellectual stimulation as this half-dead wanderer is for dihydrogen monoxide, so instead of picking through the loot you lodge your foot under his abdomen and flip him over on his side with a little more effort than you'd like to admit to leveraging.

Oh _fuck you,_ it's a _jadeblood_ _._ A Virgo, even, which takes the rarity factor and amps it up into the stratus. Also, are you nuts or... wait, _really?_

Going by the bone structure and conspicuous lack of thoracic mounds, that is not a guy, that is a flagrantly cross-dressing _girl_ _._ She's around your age, which is goddamned eerie, and all of it together tugs on at least one pusherthread enough to make it twang. How are you supposed to look at somebody your age with an extremely rare sign who's _also_ some kind of fashion deviant passed out only a few minutes away from _your very own hive_ as anything but... you're not gonna say _serendipity,_ you can't have chemistry with somebody you've never talked to - oh god, listen to you thinking shit like that, how desperate can a guy get?

... Desperate enough to stow his sickles and drag an entire troll and her luggage all the way back to his hive like an absolute fucking moron who craves death and hemorrhages bad decisions, you guess. You just hope none of your neighbors notice and judge you for it.

What a way to start your night.


End file.
